West Bromwich Albion striker Peter Odemwingie caught in media glare when the world was window watching

Depending on how sharp Peter Odemwingie is – and given his actions and
statements over the past few weeks, I am reluctant to offer prohibitively
short odds on an Odemwingie-engineered cure for cancer any time soon – there
will have come a point on Thursday night, sometime after he was turned away
from Loftus Road, when the full, mortifying reality will finally have dawned
on him.

Oops: Peter Odemwingie made an unfortunate mistake in driving down to Loftus Road on transfer deadline day - West Bromwich Albion striker Peter Odemwingie caught in media glare when the world was window watchingPhoto: GETTY IMAGES

Not so long ago, Odemwingie’s embarrassment – the footballing equivalent of failing a job interview but optimistically turning up for work on Monday nonetheless – would have passed unnoticed, a guilty secret that he could guard until the day he died. Indeed, it could be argued that his biggest slip-up was not getting caught, but getting caught in 2013, an age in which the permanent breaking apocalypse of Sky Sports News and the instant cyclone of social media reaction can take a man’s chagrin and beam it on to a million hand-held devices within seconds. Not even the terrace racists of Lokomotiv Moscow could shear Odemwingie of his human dignity. That was a job best left to English football, and its curiously rapacious appetite for nonsense.

The striker was not at West Brom v Tottenham on Sunday, but his spectre loomed over the Hawthorns like the punchline to a joke everyone knew. “He drives where he wants,” Tottenham’s fans chanted gleefully. Two young Baggies fans, meanwhile, brandished a banner reading “Odemwingie Out”. What did they think he had been trying to do?

On Sky Sports, Craig Bellamy – himself no stranger to deadline-day intrigue – was also discussing the ghost at the feast. Bellamy related a story about driving north to finalise a deal with Manchester City, only to be asked to wait in a hotel for two days. “The mistake Odemwingie made was getting caught on camera,” he said. “But that’s what makes our game great: if he scores a hat-trick, everything will be forgotten.”

This was certainly news to us. I cannot speak for all football fans here, but if pushed to identify what makes football great, most of us would probably get quite a long way down the list – Brazil 1970, play-off finals, the ornate perfection of the offside rule, catching your first whiff of fried onions on the way to a ground, Dimitar Berbatov – before the perceived moral fickleness of West Brom fans came anywhere close.

Nonetheless, like Bellamy I am prepared to sympathise, although possibly for different reasons. First, those quick to measure up Odemwingie for the sackcloth of the mercenary will almost certainly never have to make the same decision themselves. There is a headlong rush to condemn and deride footballers these days, and no shortage of reasons to do so. But trying to maximise one’s income is not one of them.

Second, there is something mildly touching about the idea of a Premier League footballer, that popular archetype of hubris, haughtiness and hauteur, being placed in this most humbling of predicaments.

Odemwingie’s plight is one with which we will all be squeamishly familiar. Turning up somewhere where we are not wanted is one of the most basic human fears, and – without wishing to be uncharitable – is something Bellamy will have experienced every other Saturday for the past decade.

Third, and most important, there can be glimpsed in Odemwingie’s tale, and the reaction to it, a valuable parable for the modern game. It speaks of the essential disposability of the footballer and his labour, as well as exposing the transfer carousel and the bilge-deluge of deadline day for the meretricious sideshow it is. Imagine what else we could have done with the airtime, column inches and attention that was ultimately devoted to the simple act of a man driving his car to a football ground.

“Everyone goes nuts on deadline day, everyone goes crazy,” Kevin Davies pointed out on Goals on Sunday on Sunday. “But he’ll be forgiven by the players.”

Read the eulogies to Gareth Bale, and you will realise how quickly football moves on. What seemed of the most rarefying importance on Thursday night is a historical footnote a few days later. It may not necessarily be what makes our game great. But it is certainly an intrinsic part of what makes our game.